The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution
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—Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature
We Homo sapiens can be the nicest of species and also the nastiest. What occurred during human evolution to account for this paradox? What are the two kinds of aggression that primates are prone to, and why did each evolve separately? How does the intensity of violence among humans compare with the aggressive behavior of other primates? How did humans domesticate themselves? And how were the acquisition of language and the practice of capital punishment determining factors in the rise of culture and civilization?
Authoritative, provocative, and engaging, The Goodness Paradox offers a startlingly original theory of how, in the last 250 million years, humankind became an increasingly peaceful species in daily interactions even as its capacity for coolly planned and devastating violence remains undiminished. In tracing the evolutionary histories of reactive and proactive aggression, biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham forcefully and persuasively argues for the necessity of social tolerance and the control of savage divisiveness still haunting us today.
Richard Wrangham
Richard Wrangham has taught biological anthropology at Harvard University since 1989. His major interests are chimpanzee behavioral ecology, the evolution of violence and tolerance, human dietary adaptation, and the conservation of chimpanzees and other apes. He has studied chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda, since 1987.
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Reviews for The Goodness Paradox
29 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Jan 3, 2023
Lots of interesting ideas here, from an eminent scientist. The development of violence and morality in human evolution, in context with other animals and especially compared to other apes is very thought provoking. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Jan 28, 2022
This work has a clear vision of two views of human nature which the author associates with the views of Hobbes and Rousseau. People are selfish and violent or they are altruistic and peaceful. The author, drawing on several disciplines, suggests that evolution has made people both. The author suggests that humans self-domesticated, suppressing the genes that cause the hormones promoting "reactive aggression". The author suggest that humans are capable of "coalitionary proactive aggression" which makes humans tend to act aggressively when we believe we will succeed, with low risk of consequences. The author draws on behavioural studies of several mammals including rats, sable foxes, wolves, chimpanzees, bonobos and genetic and molecular biology, The author frequently points out that the fossil record is sparse, and that there are no sources of historical evidence. The author suggests that early humans, like wolves and chimpanzees, engaged in collusion to attack and overthrow alpha male "bullies", which led to cultural pressure to cooperate, and to adopt pro-social moralities. It is an interesting line of speculation. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Oct 20, 2018
The premise of The Goodness Paradox takes some real effort to absorb, let alone accept. It is that Homo sapiens is actually mild mannered and non-violent, pointing to its self-domestication. That any species which can routinely slaughter its own in the millions while also routinely wiping out entire other species can be considered peaceful compared to wild animals requires some suspension of disbelief. That Richard Wrangham pulls it off so splendidly is a tribute to decades of research, a very well documented book, and a fairness exhibited in every chapter.
Wrangham does it by splitting violence into two types: proactive aggression and reactive aggression. Proactive aggressive coalitions are groups at the command of despots, from bullies to presidents-for-life. They kill individuals, families, clans and nations - when they assess that the action will be cost-free to them personally. Proactive aggression is planned and controlled, or at least purposely unleashed. Reactive aggression is a reaction, a self-defense mechanism, a fight or flight decision. It is a level of self-control that allows individuals and clans to back away from massacre, war, or fights. The tamer the species, the less reactive aggression it exhibits.
Some (Hobbesians) say Man is naturally violent, and needs Society to keep him under control. Others (Rousseauians) say Man is naturally peaceful, and Society has corrupted him into violence. Wrangham says both are right. And that’s the paradox. Then he proves both are right in no uncertain terms.
The difference between humans and animals is that you can set two unfamiliar two-year-old humans beside each other and they will not attack each other. We interact peacefully as the default option. We are helpful and altruistic without training. Chimpanzees – not so much. Chimpanzees fight every day. They will gang up on the alpha male and kill him, torture and kill females, and bite of the heads off infants. Chimps turn out to be so viciously brutal that Wrangham prefers to compare us to Neanderthals and previous editions of Homo, rather than our supposed nearest relatives.
The bulk of the book is based on the truly remarkable process of domestication. It’s not just cows and dogs and chickens that have been our charges for thousands of years. Wrangham tells the story of Dmitry Belyaev, who examined and fostered the process of domesticating wild silver foxes and minks in the USSR, even just in his own lifetime. He studied from generation to generation, while the foxes and minks changed physically as they became tamer.
More remarkably perhaps, domestication can be a self-administered process. There are examples in many species where branches have self-domesticated, with no input from Man. It happens all the time on islands, where predators and/or competition are no longer factors.
The Congo River separates chimpanzees to the north, from bonobos to the south. Bonobos self-domesticated in their more peaceful environment. Where chimps are vicious, bonobos are cuter, cuddlier, tamer, and far less violent. They both come from the same ancestor.
The physical difference between bonobos and chimps is dramatic, and Wrangham shows decisively that it comes from domestication. Skulls are smaller, canine teeth shrink, bodies become smaller and there is a dramatic shift to juvenility, called paedomorphism. They become cuter and infantilized. The physical differences between males and females reduce as well. In many species, white areas appear in the fur on the forehead or as “socks” marking the animal as domesticated. Temperamentally, domesticated animals show Increased social tolerance and reduction in reactive aggressiveness. Domesticated animals are therefore peaceful - as we have come to expect.
So the question arises: is Man self-domesticated? Wrangham shows it unquestionably. Earlier versions of Homo were bigger and stronger. Male faces protruded – they were not as flat as ours. Heads were larger, and so were bodies. A fascinating sidelight is that people are innately afraid of broad-faced men. Study after study shows it. Broad faces represent a much more fierce and threatening being that Man has not forgotten. Narrow-faced men are automatically more trustworthy.
Wrangham then pulls out a new key differentiator: language. It is because of language that people began to conform to rules. Reputations, rumors, accusations, trust and judgment all evolved in Man when language emerged. Language, he says, is the foundation of morality itself. Fear of sanction is the motivator. Morality is the polite cover. Language also allows Man to plan destruction.
Where we differ is that Wrangham thinks (like Steven Pinker et al) that violence has been on the wane, and that wars are on their way out. He is optimistic that Man’s domestication is leading toward a more peaceful race of humans, where a lack of threats means no need for war, and more tolerant attitudes will lead to forbearance rather than aggression.
There are at least two things wrong with this argument. First, the longer we go without war, the more romantic it becomes (as Wrangham himself points out). When World War I broke out, there was universal cheering, and thousands rushed to enlist, to fight the battle over – nothing. For the US Civil War, wives, mothers and children packed lunches to enjoy at the battles (at a safe distance, of course).
Second, although there has been a major reprieve since the unprecedented bloodletting of World War II, there is the ever more ominous and realistic scenario of new wars breaking out all over the world because of climate change. Those without water will have to move. So will those without land. And those whose crops no longer grow mean millions who are hungry will be on the march as well. Countries will close their borders to immigrants, unprecedented waves of them will cause chaos, and several opportunistic nations will feel obliged to grab what they can while they can. This sort of proactive aggression is Man’s specialty, not available in other species, again due to language. It’s not possible to pull together an armed force of chimps, despite their proclivity towards violence. But organizing supposedly peaceful men to kill is a well-worn path.
The Goodness Paradox is outside the box thinking writ large. It changes the perspective of where Man fits in the scheme of things. It explains a lot that has been inexplicable. And Wrangham offers all sides to every argument, so readers can see that the bases have been covered. It is at very least a revelation.
David Wineberg
Book preview
The Goodness Paradox - Richard Wrangham
Praise for Richard Wrangham’s
The Goodness Paradox
[Wrangham’s] skillful storytelling—which intertwines his hypotheses regarding primitive humans with rich details from decades of observations of chimpanzees in Tanzania—makes his book both stimulating and compelling.
—The Economist
A brilliant analysis of the role of aggression in our evolutionary history.
—Jane Goodall
Magisterial….Extraordinarily detailed, cogently argued, hugely important.
—The Spectator (London)
In this revolutionary, illuminating, and dazzling book, Wrangham provides the first compelling explanation for how and why humans can be so cooperative, kind, and compassionate yet simultaneously so brutal, aggressive, and cruel.
—Daniel E. Lieberman, author of The Story of the Human Body
"Wrangham’s skills at ‘thinking big’ make him a compelling writer. The Goodness Paradox will be a boon to discussion of our own prehistory and the role of violence in it."
—The Times Literary Supplement (London)
A fascinating new analysis of human violence, filled with fresh ideas and gripping evidence from our primate cousins, historical forebears, and contemporary neighbors.
—Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature
Compelling reading.
—The Washington Times
A work accessible to those outside the scientific field, offering a great deal of information.
—Library Journal
This magnificent and profound book shows how our violent, even murderous, impulses actually shaped our species to be kind and cooperative, progressively shaping our evolutionary trajectory, our moral expectations, and our genes.
—Nicholas A. Christakis, Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Yale University
Richard Wrangham has written a brilliant and honest book about humanity’s central contradiction: that we are capable of mass murder but live in societies with almost no violence….This book is science writing at its best: lucid, rational, and yet deeply concerned with humanity.
—Sebastian Junger, author of Tribe
"Wrangham has been the most original and influential interpreter of ecological and evolutionary factors in the origin of our species. In The Goodness Paradox, he extends his evidence and reasoning into yet another fundamental human trait."
—Edward O. Wilson, university research professor emeritus, Harvard University
Nobody knows more, thinks deeper, or writes better about the evolution of modern human beings than Richard Wrangham. Here he reveals a rich and satisfying story about the self-domestication of our species, drawing upon remarkable observations and experiments.
—Matt Ridley, author of The Evolution of Everything
This will prove to be one of the most important publications of our time. Fully supported scientific information from many directions leads us to a new and compelling analysis of our evolutionary history.
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs
This is the most thought-provoking book I have read in years. In clear, elegant prose, drawing on riveting data and vivid scenes gathered from species all over the world, renowned anthropologist Richard Wrangham examines the issues most central to human morality.
—Sy Montgomery, author of How to Be a Good Creature
Richard Wrangham
The Goodness Paradox
Richard Wrangham is Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology, Harvard University. He is the author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human and Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (with Dale Peterson). Professor Wrangham is a leader in primate behavioral ecology. He is the recipient of the Rivers Memorial Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy.
ALSO BY RICHARD WRANGHAM
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence
(with Dale Peterson)
Book Title, The Goodness Paradox, Subtitle, The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, Author, Richard Wrangham, Imprint, PantheonFIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, DECEMBER 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Richard Wrangham
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2019.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Name: Wrangham, Richard W., 1948– author.
Title: The goodness paradox : the strange relationship between virtue and violence in human evolution / Richard Wrangham.
Description: First edition. | New York : Pantheon Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018028837
Subjects: LCSH: Human evolution. Human behavior. Aggressiveness.
Classification: LCC GN281.4 .W73 2019 | DDC 155.9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028837
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9781101970195
Ebook ISBN 9781101870914
Author photograph © Stewart Halperin
Cover design by Mark Abrams
Cover illustration © MaskaRad/iStock/Getty Images
www.vintagebooks.com
v5.4_r1
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For Elizabeth
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Richard Wrangham
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Introduction: Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution
1. The Paradox
2. Two Types of Aggression
3. Human Domestication
4. Breeding Peace
5. Wild Domesticates
6. Belyaev’s Rule in Human Evolution
7. The Tyrant Problem
8. Capital Punishment
9. What Domestication Did
10. The Evolution of Right and Wrong
11. Overwhelming Power
12. War
13. Paradox Lost
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Preface
At the start of my career, I would have been surprised to learn that fifty years later I would be publishing a book about humans. In the 1970s I was privileged to be a graduate student working in Jane Goodall’s research project on chimpanzees in Tanzania. Spending whole days trailing individual apes in a natural habitat was a joy. All that I wanted to do was study animal behavior, and in 1987 I launched my own study of wild chimpanzees in Uganda’s Kibale National Park.
My bucolic research was disturbed, however, by discoveries that were too intriguing to ignore. Chimpanzees exhibited occasional episodes of exceptional violence. To shed an evolutionary light on this behavior, I compared chimpanzees with their sister species, bonobos. In the 1990s, research on bonobos was beginning in earnest. Chimpanzees and bonobos were proving to be an extraordinary duo, bonobos being much more peaceful than the relatively aggressive chimpanzees. In various collaborations that I describe in this book, but most particularly with Brian Hare and Victoria Wobber, my colleagues and I concluded that bonobos had diverged from a chimpanzee-like ancestor by a process that was strongly akin to domestication. We called the process self-domestication.
And since human behavior has often been considered similar to the behavior of domesticated animals, the insights from bonobos suggested lessons for human evolution. The key fact about humans is that within our social communities we have a low propensity to fight: compared to most wild mammals we are very tolerant.
I was acutely aware, however, that, even if humans are in some ways notably unreactive, in other ways we are a very aggressive species. In 1996, in a book called Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Dale Peterson and I described evolutionary explanations for similarities in aggression between chimpanzees and humans. The pervasiveness of violence in human society is inescapable, and the evolutionary theories explaining it seem sound. So how could our domesticated qualities and our capacity for terrible violence be reconciled? For the next twenty years or so, I grappled with this question.
The resolution that I describe in the following pages is that our social tolerance and our aggressiveness are not the opposites that at first they appear to be, because the two behaviors involve different types of aggression. Our social tolerance comes from our having a relatively low tendency for reactive aggression, whereas the violence that makes humans deadly is proactive aggression. The story of how our species came to combine these different tendencies—low reactive aggression and high proactive aggression—has not been told before. It takes us into many corners of anthropology, biology, and psychology, and will undoubtedly continue to be developed. But I believe that it already offers a rich and fresh perspective on the evolution of our behavioral and moral tendencies, as well as on the fascinating question of how and why our species, Homo sapiens, came into existence at all.
Much of the material in this book is so new that it has been published only in scientific papers. My goal here is to make this richly technical literature and its far-reaching implications more accessible. I approach the topic through the eyes of a chimpanzee-watcher who has walked, watched, and listened in many habitats of East and Central Africa. Those of us privileged to have spent days alone with apes have felt touched by Pleistocene breezes. The romance of the past, the story of our ancestors, is a thrill, and innumerable mysteries remain for future generations seeking the origins of the modern mind in deep time. Enlarged understanding of our prehistory and of who we are will not be the only reward. Dreams inspired by the African air can yet generate a stronger and more secure view of ourselves, if we open our minds to worlds beyond those that we know well.
Introduction
Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution
ADOLF HITLER, WHO ordered the execution of some eight million people and was responsible for the deaths of many millions more, was said by his secretary Traudl Junge to have had an agreeable, friendly, and paternal manner. He hated cruelty to animals: he was a vegetarian, adored his dog Blondi and was inconsolable when Blondi died.
Pol Pot, the leader of Cambodia whose policies killed maybe a quarter of his country’s people, was known to his acquaintances as a soft-spoken and kindly teacher of French history.
During eighteen months in prison, Joseph Stalin was always amazingly calm and never shouted or swore. In effect, he was a model gentleman-inmate, not obviously the kind of person who would later annihilate millions for political convenience.
Because seriously evil men can have a gentle side, we hesitate to empathize with their kindness for fear of seeming to rationalize or excuse their crimes. Such men remind us, however, of a curious fact about our species. We are not merely the most intelligent of animals. We also have a rare and perplexing combination of moral tendencies. We can be the nastiest of species and also the nicest.
In 1958, the playwright and songwriter Noël Coward captured the strangeness of this duality. He had lived through the Second World War, and the bad side of human nature was fully obvious to him. It is hard to imagine,
he wrote, considering the inherent silliness, cruelty and superstition of the human race, how it has contrived to last as long as it has. The witch-hunting, the torturing, the gullibility, the massacres, the intolerance, the wild futility of human behaviour over the centuries is hardly credible.
¹
And yet most of the time we do wonderful things that are the very opposite of silliness, cruelty and superstition,
depending as they do on reason, kindness, and cooperation. The technological and cultural marvels that distinguish our species are made possible by these qualities, in combination with our intelligence. Coward’s examples still resonate.
Hearts can be withdrawn from human breasts, dead hearts, and, after a little neat manipulation, popped back again as good as new. The skies can be conquered. Sputniks can whizz round and round the globe and be controlled and guided…and My Fair Lady opened in London last night.
Heart surgery, space travel, and comic opera all depend on advances that would have amazed our distant ancestors. More important from an evolutionary point of view, however, they also depend on capacities for a quite exceptional ability to work together, including tolerance, trust, and understanding. Those are some of the qualities that cause our species to be thought of as exceptionally good.
In short, a great oddity about humanity is our moral range, from unspeakable viciousness to heartbreaking generosity. From a biological perspective, such diversity presents an unsolved problem. If we evolved to be good, why are we also so vile? Or if we evolved to be wicked, how come we can also be so benign?
The combination of human good and evil is not a product of modernity. To judge from the behavior of recent hunter-gatherers and the records of archaeology, for hundreds of thousands of years people have shared food, divided their labor, and helped the needy. Our Pleistocene ancestors were in many ways thoroughly tolerant and peaceful. Yet the same sources of evidence also indicate that our forebears practiced raiding, sexual dominance, torture, and executions with varieties of cruelty that were as abominable as any Nazi practice. Certainly nowadays, a capacity for great cruelty and violence is not particular to any one group. For a variety of reasons, a given society might have experienced exceptional peace for decades even as another might have suffered spasms of exceptional violence. But this does not suggest any differences in the innate psychology of people throughout time and world over. Everywhere humans seem to have had the same propensity for both virtue and violence.
Babies show a similar contradiction in their tendencies. Before infants can talk, they will smile and chuckle and sometimes help a friendly adult in need, an extraordinary demonstration of our innate predisposition to trust one another. At other times, however, those same bighearted offspring will scream and rage with sublime self-centeredness to get their way.
There are two classic explanations for this paradoxical combination of selflessness and selfishness. Both assume that our social behavior is hugely determined by our biology. Both also agree that only one of our two notable tendencies is the product of genetic evolution. They differ, however, in which side of our personality each regards as fundamental—our docility, or our aggressiveness.
One explanation posits that tolerance and docility are innate to humanity. According to this view, although we are essentially good, our corruptibility stands in the way of our living in perpetual peace. Some religious thinkers blame supernatural forces such as the devil or original sin
for this state of affairs. Secular thinkers, by contrast, might choose instead to imagine evil as engendered by societal forces such as patriarchy, imperialism, or inequality. Either way, it is assumed that we are born good but are susceptible to corruption.
The other explanation claims that it is our bad side that is innate. We are born selfish and competitive, and we would continue in the same vein were it not for efforts at self-improvement informed by civilizing forces, which might include enjoinments from parents, philosophers, priests, and teachers, or the lessons of history.
For centuries, people have simplified their understanding of a confusing world by adopting one or the other of these opposed views. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes are classic icons for the alternatives. Rousseau has come to stand for humanity’s being instinctively nice, Hobbes for humanity’s being naturally wicked.²
Both positions have some merit. There is plenty of evidence that humans have innate tendencies for kindness, just as there is for our having spontaneously selfish feelings that can lead to aggression. No one has found a way to say that one kind of tendency is more biologically meaningful or evolutionarily influential than the other.
The intrusion of politics makes the debate all the harder to settle, because when these abstractly theoretical analyses become arguments with societal significance, both sides tend to harden their stance. If you are a Rousseauian, your belief in essential human goodness probably marks you out as a peace-loving, easygoing crusader for social justice with faith in the masses. If you are a Hobbesian, your cynical view of human motives suggests you see a need for social control, cherishing hierarchy and accepting the inevitability of war. The debate becomes less about biology or psychology and more about social causes, political structures, and the moral high ground. Prospects for simple resolution duly recede.
I believe that there is an escape from this morass about the fundamental nature of humans. Rather than needing to prove that either side is wrong, we should ask whether the debate makes sense at all. Babies point us in the right direction: the Rousseau and Hobbes perspectives were both right as far as they went. We are naturally good in the way that Rousseau is said to have claimed, and we are naturally selfish, much as Hobbes argued. The potential for good and evil occurs in every individual. Our biology determines the contradictory aspects of our personalities, and society modifies both tendencies. Our goodness can be intensified or corrupted, just as our selfishness can be exaggerated or reduced.
Once we acknowledge that we are at once innately good and innately bad, the sterile old argument gives way to fascinating new problems. If Rousseauians and Hobbesians are both partly right, then what is the source of our strange combination of behavioral tendencies? We know from the study of other species, particularly birds and mammals, that natural selection can favor a wide range of inclinations. Some species are relatively uncompetitive, some relatively aggressive, some both, some neither. The combination that makes humans odd is that we are both intensely calm in our normal social interactions, and yet in some circumstances so aggressive that we readily kill. How did this come to be?
—
Evolutionary biologists follow a principle crisply stated by the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky in a 1973 address to the National Association of Biology Teachers: Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
How evolutionary theory is best used, however, is a subject of debate. A key question for this book is: what is the significance of primate behavior?
A traditional view holds that animal and human mentality differ so widely that primates are irrelevant for the science of human nature.³ Thomas Henry Huxley was the first evolutionary biologist to challenge that position. In 1863 he argued that apes provide rich clues to the origins of human behavior and cognition: I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation…can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves.
Huxley anticipated his opponents’ objections. On all sides I shall hear the cry—‘The power of knowledge—the conscience of good and evil—the pitiful tenderness of human affections, raise us out of all real fellowship with the brutes.’
⁴ That kind of skepticism is understandable and has not completely disappeared. In 2003, the evolutionary biologist David Barash argued it is highly questionable whether human beings carry a significant primate legacy at all when it comes to behavior.
⁵
There are also variations of behavior galore due to culture. One society is peaceful, another violent. One reckons clan membership down the female line, one down the male line. Some have strict rules about sexual behavior, while others are lax. The diversity can seem so overwhelming as to render uniformity irrelevant for comparison with other species. After a detailed survey of hunter-gatherer behavior, the anthropologist Robert Kelly abandoned the notion that human behavior can be characterized as having any particular form. There is no original human society, no basal human adaptation,
he wrote in 1995. Universal behaviors…never existed.
⁶
In short, the idea that human behavior is so infinitely variable that our species has no special features in common with nonhuman primates is understandable. Two strong arguments stand against it, however.
On the one hand, human variation is limited. We really do have characteristic forms of society. Nowhere do people live in troops, as baboons do, or in isolated harems, like gorillas, or in entirely promiscuous communities, like chimpanzees or bonobos. Human societies consist of families within groups that are part of larger communities, an arrangement that is characteristic of our species and distinctive from other species.
Yet, on the other hand, in many ways humans and primates really do behave alike. The evolutionist Charles Darwin early on observed similarities in the expressions of emotion in humans and other animals, such as the bristling of the hair under the influence of extreme terror
or uncovering of the teeth under [the influence] of extreme rage.
This community of certain expressions,
he wrote, is rendered somewhat more intelligible if we believe in their descent from a common ancestor.
⁷
The fact that we share smiles and frowns with our cousin primates is intriguing, but even that observation seems relatively trivial compared with the discoveries about chimpanzee and bonobo behavior that began in the 1960s, and continue to accumulate. Chimpanzees and bonobos are the two ape species most closely, and equally, related to humans. They present an astonishing pair. They look so similar to each other that they were not recognized to be separate species for years after both were known. Each of the two sister species shares extensive behavioral similarities to humans. Yet they are in many ways social opposites.
Among chimpanzees, males are dominant over females, and they are relatively violent. Among bonobos, females are often dominant over males, violence is muted, and eroticism is a frequent substitute for aggression. The behavioral distinctions between the two eerily echo competing social stances in the modern human world: the divergence of male and female interests, for example; or between hierarchy, competition, and power on the one hand, and egalitarianism, tolerance, and negotiated settlement on the other. The two species conjure such different visions of the essential ape that their opposition has become something of a battleground in primatology, each supposed by different schools to represent our ancestral lineage better than the other. As we will see, the notion that either chimpanzees or bonobos, but not both, point to human behavioral origins is not very helpful. A more intriguing goal is to understand why the two species are similar to humans in their different ways. Their behavioral contrasts are of a piece with the central question animating this book: why are humans both highly tolerant, like bonobos, and highly violent, like chimpanzees?
—
Chapter 1 launches the investigation by documenting behavioral differences among humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos. Decades of research suggest how species differences in aggression can evolve. Aggressiveness was once thought of as a tendency running from low to high along one dimension. But we now recognize that aggression comes in not one but two major forms, each with its own biological underpinnings and its own evolutionary story. As I show in chapter 2, humans are positively dualistic with respect to aggression. We are low on the scale of one type (reactive aggression), and high on the other (proactive aggression). Reactive aggression is the hot
type, such as losing one’s temper and lashing out. Proactive aggression is cold,
planned and deliberate. So our core question becomes two: why are we so lacking in reactive aggressiveness, and yet so highly proficient at proactive aggressiveness? The answer to the first explains our virtue; the answer to the second accounts for our violence.
Our low tendency for reactive aggression gives us our relative docility and tolerance. Tolerance is a rare phenomenon in wild animals, at least in the extreme form that humans show. It is found, however, among domesticated species. In chapter 3, I consider the similarities between domesticated animals and humans, and show why an increasing number of scientists believe that humans should be regarded as a domesticated version of an earlier human ancestor.
One of the exciting aspects of the biology of domesticated animals is that researchers are beginning to understand puzzling similarities that occur among many unrelated species. Why, for example, do cats, dogs, and horses frequently sport white patches of hair, unlike their wild ancestors? Chapter 4 explains new theories linking the evolution of physical features such as these to changes in behavior. Humans exhibit enough such features to justify calling us a domesticated species. That conclusion, which was first intimated more than two hundred years ago, creates a problem. If humans are like a domesticated species, how did we get that way? Who could have domesticated us?
Bonobos suggest a solution. In chapter 5, I review the evidence that bonobos, like humans, show many of the features of a domesticated species. Obviously, bonobos were not domesticated by humans. The process happened in nature, unaffected by human beings. Bonobos must have self-domesticated. That evolutionary transformation seems likely to be widespread among wild species. If so, there would be nothing exceptional in the self-domestication of human ancestors. In chapter 6, I therefore trace the evidence that Homo sapiens have had a domestication syndrome since their origin, about 300,000 years ago. Surprisingly few attempts have been made to explain why Homo sapiens arose, and as I describe, even the most recent paleoanthropological scenarios have not addressed the important problem of why selection should have favored a relatively tolerant, docile species with a low tendency for reactive aggression.
How self-domestication happened is in general an open question, with different answers expected for different species. Clues come from the way that aggressive individuals are prevented from dominating others. Among bonobos, aggressive males are suppressed mainly by the joint action of cooperating females. Probably, therefore, bonobo self-domestication was initiated by females’ being able to punish bullying males. In small-scale societies of humans, females do not control males to the same extent as they do among bonobos. Instead, among humans, the ultimate solution to stopping male aggressors is execution by adult males. In chapters 7 and 8, I describe the use of execution in human society to force domineering men to conform to egalitarian norms, and I explain why I believe self-domestication through the selective force of execution was responsible for reducing humans’ reactive aggression from the beginnings of Homo sapiens.
If genetic selection against reactive aggression indeed occurred through self-domestication, we should expect human behavior to share aspects of the behavior of domesticated animals beyond reduced aggression. In chapter 9, I examine this proposition. I emphasize that the proper comparison is not between humans and apes, because too many evolutionary changes have occurred in the seven million years or so since we had a common ancestor. Instead, the proper comparison is between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, whom I take as a stand-in for our pre-sapiens ancestors. Chapter 9 reviews evidence that Homo sapiens had a more highly elaborated culture than Neanderthals. The difference, I propose, is plausibly due to Homo sapiens’s having lost more of the aggressiveness of the common ancestor than Neanderthals did.
A low propensity for reactive aggression enhances the capacity for tolerant cooperation, but it is not the only contributor to human social virtue. Morality is also vital. Chapter 10 asks why our evolved moral sensibilities often make people afraid of being criticized. Sensitivity to criticism, I conclude, would have promoted evolutionary success thanks to the emergence of the same new social feature that was responsible for self-domestication: a coalition able to carry out executions at will. Our ancestors’ moral senses helped protect them from being killed for the crime of nonconformity.
The ability of adults (and particularly men) to conspire in the act of capital punishment is part of a larger system of social control using proactive aggression that characterizes all human societies. Chapter 11 discusses how humans echo chimpanzee behavior in this regard but have elaborated it far beyond chimpanzee style. Since proactive aggression is complementary to reactive aggression (rather than its opposite), proactive, planful aggression can be positively selected even while reactive, emotional aggression has been evolutionarily suppressed. Humans can therefore use overwhelming power to kill a selected opponent. This unique ability is transformative. It has led our societies to include hierarchical social relationships that are far more despotic than those found in other species.
A familiar and important occurrence of proactive aggression is in war, so, in chapter 12, I consider some of the ways in which the psychology of aggression influences warfare. Although contemporary war is much more institutionalized than most prehistoric intergroup violence, our tendencies for proactive and reactive aggression both play important roles, sometimes promoting and sometimes interfering with military goals.
Chapter 13 assesses the paradox that virtue and violence are both so prominent in human life. The solution is not so simple or morally desirable as we might wish: humans are neither all good nor all bad. We have evolved in both directions simultaneously. Both our tolerance and our violence are adaptive tendencies that have played vital roles in bringing us to our present state. The idea that human nature is at the same time both virtuous and wicked is challenging, since presumably we would all wish for simplicity. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
I must hold in balance,
he continued, …the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future.
I like Fitzgerald’s thought. The moral contradictions of our ancestry should not prevent us from reaching a realistic assessment of who we are. When we do that, high hopes are still possible.⁸
1
The Paradox
I STARTED THINKING ABOUT the biological roots of peacefulness several decades ago, in a remote part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Later, the Congo would suffer badly, but in 1980, when Elizabeth Ross and I began a nine-month honeymoon in the Ituri Forest, all was quiet.
We were there as part of a two-couple team. Our job was to document the lives of two societies living alongside each other, Lese farmers and Efe foragers. Small villages of Lese farmers dotted the vast Ituri plain, some as far as two days’ walk from their neighbors. Efe pygmies occupied the same area. When the Efe could find roots and fruits, they camped deep in the forest. In leaner times, they settled on the edge of a familiar village. Efe women then worked in the Lese gardens in exchange for cassava, bananas, or rice.
We lived in leaf-roofed, mud-walled huts in our own little clearing near a Lese village. We could not speak their first language, KiLese, but we knew enough KiNgwana, a version of Swahili, to have cheerful conversations with them. The Ituri people knew little of the outside world. Their economy was based largely on barter. Such things as nuclear bombs, soda cans, and electricity were outside their experience.
The living quarters of both the Efe foragers and the Lese farmers were small and dark and were hardly used at all by day. So life between dawn and dusk was public, which meant that, throughout the daylight hours, we could record behavior openly. We watched and listened and followed. We shared their food and joined in their activities. As a behavioral biologist who had studied chimpanzees and seen their intemperate aggression to one another, I was alert to the possibility of important events such as the sight of clenched fists or the drawing of bows. Having grown up in the sleepy British countryside where even a raised voice, let alone public fighting, was a rarity, I had wondered if aggression would be more obvious in this distant Congolese settlement.
It was wonderful to be able to see so much social interaction, but on the aggression score, there was little of interest. Even when dozens of people competed for meat around the carcass of an elephant, there was nothing more than occasional raised voices. Once, I met three men in fighting gear, loincloths furled around their hips, en route to the chief’s village. They had heard that their teenage sisters had been taken to a feast by the chief’s kin, and the three men were intent on preventing their sisters from being debauched. They proved able to rescue the girls without violence. We heard of an Efe man who hit his wife with a flaming log. Doubtless a few other incidents were hidden behind whispers and mud walls, but the only injuries we saw were the results of accident and disease.
Our Ituri companions had some of the toughest lives on earth. Living off what they grew, hunted, or found in an unproductive forest, they faced routine food shortages, poverty, discomfort, and desperate illnesses virtually unaided by modern medicine. Their cultural practices often seemed to make life harder. They beautified girls by crudely chipping their teeth. They remembered their own grandparents as cannibals. Pictures on the side of cans of meat showed smiling people, so the Lese teased us with the idea that Europeans who ate canned food were cannibals, too. Funerals brought arguments over the value of the dead: had a woman produced enough children to be worth her bride price of seven chickens? Even the most understandable misfortunes were attributed to witchcraft, a daily source of irrational threat. In many ways, the Ituri was a place where anything might happen.¹
Beyond the practical hardships and weird superstitions, however, the Lese and Efe were entirely familiar in their basic psychology. Illogical beliefs, poverty, and strange medical practices took different forms in rural England and the Congo, but they were present in both. At heart, the Ituri people were hauntingly like the villagers in my native England—loving their children, quarreling over their lovers, worrying about gossip, looking for allies, jockeying for power, trading information, fearing strangers, planning parties, embracing ritual, ranting at fate—and very, very rarely getting into fights.
Obviously, humans can be more or less violent depending on social context. The Congo had a central government, and although the Ituri peoples were in many ways independent of it, they were not totally isolated. Perhaps the calm of the Lese and Efe was a result of the civilizing influences of cultural development that ultimately emanated from Kinshasa, the distant capital city. There was a police force, for instance. The police were mostly male kinsmen of the chef de la localité. They used their status less to uphold the law than to exploit the villagers. On the rare occasions when they toured the neighborhood, a few policemen would arrive in a village after a walk of a few hours. They never brought food. So they would find a trivial excuse for fining an unfortunate host a chicken, eat it that night, and then stay on for as many days as they could continue extracting meals. The mundane corruption was of course resented, so the police were not much respected. Even so, in theory their occasional presence, with their supposed ties to a larger state apparatus, might have tempered spontaneous expressions of anger. One could argue, therefore, that modern societal influences had reduced the level of aggression in the Ituri.
To find out whether the same gentleness holds when a group is truly independent of any governing body, we need to consider a society without a police force, a military, or any other presiding coercive institution.
—
New Guinea is one of the few places where small-scale societies have been documented while living in true political anarchy, free from even the remotest interference of a state. Its cultures are particularly informative because they show how people behave when living with a constant threat of being attacked by neighboring groups.
Anthropologist Karl Heider visited one such society. In March 1961, he took off in a small plane from the north coast of New Guinea, rose toward the heart of the island, came to a high mountain barrier, found a pass free of cloud, and saw the Grand Valley of the Baliem River opening up green and broad beneath. U.S. soldiers had discovered this hidden world when they crash-landed there in 1944. On finding fifty thousand Dani farmers living as if in the Stone Age, the soldiers had innocently named it Shangri-La—after the valley invented by James Hilton in his 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, a fictional Utopia. The peaceful appearance of the Dani’s fertile land was in some ways deceptive, however. This was no paradise. It was a hotbed of war.²
The Dani had one of the highest killing rates ever recorded. Sometimes Heider found small groups of men setting off on raids to ambush an unsuspecting victim. Occasionally, there were battles: in the no-man’s-lands between villages, minor skirmishes could dissolve into larger chaos, with up to 125 villagers killed at a time. In a macabre index of the bloodletting, fallen warriors were commemorated by the removal of a finger from girls as young as three years old; among the Dani there were hardly any women with intact hands. Heider’s figures indicated that, if the rest of the world had been like the Dani, the twentieth century’s sickening 100 million war deaths would have ballooned to an unthinkable 2 billion.³
Yet, when Heider wrote a book about the Dani, his subtitle was Peaceful Warriors. His phrase draws attention to the essential human paradox. Beyond the intermittent mayhem, in the calm of ordinary life, Shangri-La really was a fair name for the Grand Valley. The Dani raised their pigs and tubers with a farmer’s typical steadiness. Heider wrote of the people’s low-key temperament, gentle demeanor, and rarity of anger. These were pacific, caring individuals who lived in systems of mutual dependence and support. When Dani households were not lulled by easy conversation, he said, they rang with song and laughter. Restraint and respect marked their daily interactions. As long as they had no war, the Dani were in many ways ordinary rural folks leading calm, thoroughly unaggressive lives.⁴
The Dani proved typical of the remote New Guinea highlands in combining peace within the group with homicide of outsiders. Another New Guinea group, the Baktaman, occupied the headwaters of the Fly River. Every Baktaman community resisted trespass, often with violence. Territorial conflicts were so severe that they caused a third of the community’s deaths. Yet, within the villages, violence was severely controlled and killing denied to be conceivable.
⁵ It was the same in the basin of the Tagari River, in west central Papua New Guinea, where the Huli terrorized their enemies but had no violence within their own villages.⁶ Those New Guinea peoples were rapidly changed by contact with missionaries and the state. But before governments intervened, the people showed something very important: even among people with continuous war, there was a huge distinction between peace at home
and war abroad.
Only a few other sites have offered the same opportunities as New Guinea for research into independent societies unaffected by a state. The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon studied a remote population of the Yanomamö people of Venezuela for some thirty years, from the mid-1960s.⁷ He found a similarly stark contrast. Despite a high rate of lethal violence in interactions among villages, within villages—even among these people, whom Chagnon characterized as fierce
—family lives were very tranquil
and episodes of aggression were largely regulated into formal duels.⁸
The anthropologists Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado documented intergroup fighting among the Aché hunter-gatherers of Paraguay shortly after an Aché group had settled into a mission station. The Aché reported having previously used their hunting weapons of bows and arrows to shoot